The first four parts of this book are absolutely fascinating. It's an in depth look at the psychology of shopping and it is exactly what the title promises. Underhill's company gets paid to spy on people in stores and see what they're doing wrong and right. The gems in this book are the anecdotes and the specific revelations about how any obstacle you put in the way of a shopper drops your sales figures. Any way you can make life easier raises your sales. This all seems sort of obvious, but most people running the businesses don't think it through.

In 2005, Amazon announced the creation of Amazon Prime, a membership offering free two-day shipping within the contiguous United States on all eligible purchases for a flat annual fee of $79 (equivalent to $99 in 2017),[10] as well as discounted one-day shipping rates.[11] Amazon launched the program in Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom in 2007; in France (as "Amazon Premium") in 2008, in Italy in 2011, in Canada in 2013,[12] and in India on July 26, 2016.[13]
Make every night a movie night with Prime Video. Your Prime membership includes instant access to thousands of movies and TV shows at no additional cost. Catch Prime Originals like Golden Globe-winning series Transparent, Mozart in the Jungle, and Goliath, and Emmy-winning show The Man in the High Castle. Stream what you love on select smart TVs, Roku, Xbox, Amazon Fire TV, iPhones, tablets, and Android devices. You can even download to your device and watch offline.

Amazon Studios brings bold and innovative series and films from top tier and up-and-coming creators to customers in over 200 countries and territories. Original productions range from daring and timely subject matter such as Amy Sherman-Palladino’s award-winning The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and acclaimed filmmaker Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq; to the critically hailed The Grand Tour, Mozart in the Jungle and Man in the High Castle. In film, Amazon Studios produces and acquires original movies for theatrical release and early window distribution exclusively for Amazon Prime members. At the 2017 Academy Awards, Amazon Studios became the first streaming service to win Oscars for Manchester by the Sea (Best Screenplay, Kenneth Lonergan and Best Actor, Casey Affleck) and The Salesman (Best Foreign Film). Recent notable releases include the box office success The Big Sick, which is one of the top streaming films on Prime. Upcoming films in 2018 include Lauren Greenfield’s Generation Wealth, Gus Van Sant’s Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, Dan Fogelman’s Life Itself, Luca Guadagnio’s Suspiria and Felix Van Groeningen’s Beautiful Boy.

Deborah Weinswig, CEO and Founder of Coresight Research, weighs in, noting, “Consumers with Prime memberships are meaningfully more likely to buy nontraditional categories on Amazon. Prime members are naturally a self-selecting group of Amazon shoppers, because only regular customers would opt for a membership. But we think that once consumers become members, they see the value of buying types of products on the site that they may not traditionally associate with Amazon, such as groceries and clothing. That’s why Prime memberships are so important.”
After acquiring Whole Foods, Amazon immediately slashed the supermarket's prices on select food items. Mot recently, it announced that Prime members can enjoy exclusive savings at Whole Foods locations nationwide. In addition Prime members with an Amazon Rewards Visa Card can get 5 percent back on their Whole Foods purchases. (Non-Prime members will get 3 percent back). That's in addition to the 5 percent they already earn on Amazon.com purchases, 2 percent at restaurants, gas stations, and drugstores, and 1 percent back on all other purchases. Amazon also announced free 2-hour Whole Foods deliveries via the company's Prime Now service. Deliveries are available in select cities only.
But with that awesome power comes...strange choices. For some of us, that one-click checkout button can lead to some unusual impulse buys. For others, it's all too easy to start browsing Amazon in a late-night haze, saying yes to things you'd ordinarily never consider you needed in your life. But now that you've got a five-pound bag of Skittles or a dedicated wall-mounted purse hanger in your life, you've got to make the most of it, right?
A meaningful 18.8% of Amazon apparel shoppers are interested in trying the retailer’s still-new private-label fashion ranges. Just 12% think that the website could be made easier to browse, indicating that the majority of the site’s apparel shoppers are satisified with the Amazon Fashion shopping experience. Younger consumers we surveyed registered higher-than-average responses to each of the statements below, reflecting a higher level of interest in trying new Amazon Fashion products and services.
The only issue, however, is that while it’s easy-peasy to load up on veggies, meats, and dairy during mealtimes, finding yourself starving at 4 p.m. without a suitable snack can be quite the downer. Fear not, keto crusader, because there’s more to life (or more to Amazon, at least) than tortilla chips and chocolate chip cookies. These nine keto snacks are only a couple of clicks away.
For more than two decades, shoppers perusing the aisles of Walmart have run into cans of Sam’s cola or coffee alongside national brands on the shelves. In Costco, shoppers can pickup store-brand Kirkland paper towels and bacon. (Store brands are typically priced well below their big-brand peers because they do not spend money on expensive national marketing campaigns like Procter & Gamble or Kimberly-Clark.)
Like Me is an indictment of a life spent “extremely” online: a thriller in which the thrill is the threat of empty transgression; a body horror flick in which the body horror is the way social media and Tumblr and Reddit and YouTube transform us, make us grotesque, perverting basic physical functions into scary, dysmorphic representations of the flesh sacks we carry around with us whenever we’re not online. Early in the film, writer-director Robert Mockler introduces us to the online world of our main character, Kiya (Addison Timlin, terrifying), via a disturbing barrage of hyperreal, gif-like images—close-ups of sugary cereal and milk chewed sloppily, of a viscous tongue mid-slurp, of Kiya doing weird kinesthetics in a dirty motel room while the camera capsizes and arises around her, this Manic Pixie Dream Girl who embodies each of those words as literally as possible. Though Mockler implies that these are all curated posts Kiya’s put online, we believe that this is how she sees the world. Aided by some seriously heady opioids and hallucinogens, she can’t help but digest her lived experiences without mitigating them digitally. As Kiya moves through Mockler’s pink-ish, neon dystopia, DP James Siewert shooting Timlin as if she’s stranded in the middle of a Michael Mann joint, everything seems on the table. Kiya lures a motel manager, Marshall (Larry Fessenden, better than excellent), to her room—another room, another motel, somewhere on this stupid planet—with the possibility of sex. Instead, he finds Kiya’s redecorated her room like an outtake from The Cell, testing the lonely guy’s willingness to go along with whatever insanity’s in store. Of course, some icky gastrointestinal calamity occurs, but Marshall never flinches, so Kiya kidnaps him and takes him with her. Gorgeous and gross in equal measure, Like Me is a visual feast. Mockler conjures setpieces out of practically nothing, crafting each frame with a meticulous symmetry that belies the chaos at the heart of Kiya’s impulsive odyssey. —Dom Sinacola
Lowitz said that since Prime’s inception in 2005, Amazon has homed in on making the service “compelling” to customers, including with two-day shipping, streaming video service and promotions such as Prime Day. But as it reaches saturation, Amazon must rely on monetizing its existing Prime membership. That might include getting members to listen to their favorite podcasts on an Echo Dot, or a slew of other measures to bring Amazon services and products into daily life.
Totally unique to our Music Store, Amazon.com offers a program called AutoRip that automatically makes the hard copy of AutoRip-eligible albums you’ve just purchased available on your Amazon.com Cloud Player. Now you can have the physical CDs or vinyl records for your own personal collection, and you can listen to your favorite songs wherever you can access your Cloud Player. Whether you’re ready to tune in to Coltrane or Sinatra, or indie bands like The Strokes, you can purchase AutoRip-ready vinyl and CDs so you don’t have to wait to listen to your favorite records.

Imperiled families are popular forms of community in documentaries this year—on the more heartwarming side is Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, the deceptively straightforward new film from Hoop Dreams director Steve James. In it, James details the ordeal of the Sungs, who ran the only bank to face federal prosecution in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse. What’s even more surprising is that their bank, Abacus Federal Savings, was a tiny, local institution catering to New York City’s Chinatown residents—hardly one of the massive financial corporations that helped crater the world economy. There is a happy ending to Abacus’s legal nightmare, however, but James uses the court case as a means to explore the Sung family, particularly patriarch Thomas Sung, who even in his late 70s still elicits a strong hold over his adult daughters, who help run the bank with him while jockeying to curry his favor. Abacus is a family portrait mixed with current events, and if it’s less ambitious than Hoop Dreams that doesn’t diminish the warmth and subtlety James brings to this look at an anxious, close-knit clan who rally around one another once the government goes after them. —Tim Grierson

In April 2014, Amazon announced its Amazon Fire TV set-top box system, a device targeted to compete with such systems like Apple TV or Google's Chromecast device. The Amazon set-top box allows for streaming videos from sites like Amazon's own streaming service as well as others such as Netflix or Hulu. The device also supports voice search for movies, as well as gaming, which includes special versions of Minecraft, Asphalt 8, and The Walking Dead.[39][40] Amazon announced the Fire TV Stick in October 2014. The device replicates much of the functionality of the Fire TV.[41]